this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Curious to hear people’s ideas on how education would look in such a world.

For me, I’d like to see it moved away from testing and results based learning.

A stronger focus on physical engagement with things, e.g. learning biology by going out and cataloging wildlife and learning what’s in a local ecosystem before coming together and researching findings and looking for new questions to ask.

Less sitting around at desks being fed information and a greater focus on individual agency in exploring topics of interest.

Not to say there isn’t a time and a place for “high level” stuff where you need to deep dive into books and listen to lectures, but there needs to be a greater balance in methodology.

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[–] JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

So there's a lot of good suggestions here I agree with - I think from personal experience I'd second the hands-on aspect, at least as an option.

I struggled with a lot of school but thrived in shop and tech classes, whether it was residential wiring, forging metal, using architectural software to design buildings to requirements, designing and assembling simple robots, and eventually one of those teachers let me set up a one-person self taught Python class (we didn't have programming yet) which gave me a head start in college. There's a lot of course content I can't remember but almost two decades later I can apparently still strike an arc and cary a bead with an arc welder. Similarly, the Boy Scouts, though a sometimes problematic organization, did an awesome job teaching us about all kinds of stuff from basic skills to more academic knowledge about tree and animal identification, and it made great use of community knowledge by bringing in local adults to teach us their area of expertise.

By contrast, in the worst school class I remember the teacher would cover the whiteboard in notes, mostly dates, and we'd have to spend half the class session transcribing that to our notebooks before she'd begin the lecture and give us any context for it. History is just stories, and it's full of crazy stuff, how do people find so many ways to make it boring? Kids love stories, just tell them what happened and they'll have enough info on context and technology to know roughly when something happened if that's really important.

Edit: I'm realizing now that I need the context around learning something - the metal shop stuff had here's what we're making, here's how you use a milling machine so you can make it. Here's other stuff you can make with it. You can hold the finished thing in your hand, or flip a switch you wired and see a lightbulb come on. Write a program, see it run, change it, see what changes. In history, you can tell a story, then use the dates to explain what other things happened and how they impacted or were impacted by whatever the story was about.